This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A young man wanted to know the difference between Heaven and Hell. The sage led him to two rooms with observation portals, one labeled Heaven and one Hell. Looking in at Hell he saw a banquet table filled with luscious food but the people at the table were emaciated and distressed. Their spoons had long handles to reach the food, but the handles were too long to bring the food to their mouths. Then he looked in on Heaven. Same table full of luscious food. Same long spoons. But the people were healthy and happy and using their long-handled spoons to feed one another.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
There is only one tyrant in life, which is a lack of understanding of life.
Experience | Illusion | Man | Past | Right | Will | World | Think |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
In camp too, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods (as in the famous water color by Dürer), the same woods in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant. One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, 'How beautiful the world could be!'
Can you eat a meal with a single finger? When the five fingers work in unison, the stomach is filled in five minutes. So, no attachment should be developed; no wish is to be welcomed, nothing is to be sought for; and no defeat is to be taken to heart, without solving deep into the consequences.
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity ; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness—that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times.
Possessions | Reputation | Space |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Counsel is to give reasons for men to act they do not know.
Illusion |
Whenever logical processes of thought are employed— that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove— there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine.
Absolute | Chance | Energy | Guidance | Meaning | Phenomena | Property | Science | Space | Time | Universe | Wonder | Guidance |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.
Consequences | Contemplation | Conversation | Decision | Deliberation | Dread | Enough | Glory | Illusion | Life | Life | Men | Past | Poverty | Practice | Reality | Deliberation | Contemplation | Think |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
Nothing is easier than to falsify the past. Lifeless instruction will do it. If you rob it of vitality, stiffen it with pedantry, sophisticate it with argument, chill it with unsympathetic comment, you render it as dead as any academic exercise. The safest way in all ordinary seasons is to let it speak for itself: resort to its records, listen to its poets and to its masters in the humbler art of prose. Your real and proper object, after all, is not to expound, but to realize it, consort with it, and make your spirit kin with it, so that you may never shake the sense of obligation off. In short, I believe that the catholic study of the world's literature as a record of spirit is the right preparation for leadership in the world's affairs, if you undertake it like a man and not like a pedant.
Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.
Dedication | Life | Life | Space | Time |
Could I come near your beauty with my nails, I 'd set my ten commandments in your face. King Henry VI. Part II. Act i. Sc. 3.
Space |
William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
We live, but a world has passed away with the years that perished to make us men.
However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven’t it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.
Abstract | Individuality | Majority | Space |
And what do ye say then? — that spring long departed has brought forth no child to the softness and showers; — that we slept and we dreamed through the summer of flowers; we dreamed of the winter, and waking dead-hearted found winter upon us and waste of dull hours.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
The room was much as he had left it, festeringly untidy, though the effect was muted a little by a thick layer of dust. Half-read books and magazines nestled among piles of half-used towels. Half-pairs of socks reclined in half-drunk cups of coffee. What once had been a half-eaten sandwich had now half-turned into something that Arthur didn’t entirely want to know about. Bung a fork of lightning through this lot, he thought to himself, and you’d start the evolution of life off all over again.